The main conclusion
of “Civilians under Assault” is that Hezbollah
“repeatedly bombarded cities, towns, and villages without
any apparent effort to distinguish between civilians and
military objectives. In doing so, Hezbollah, as a party to
an armed conflict governed by international humanitarian
law, violated fundamental prohibitions against deliberate
and indiscriminate attacks against civilians….In some of
those cases, we could find no evidence there had been a
legitimate military target in the vicinity at the time of
the attack, suggesting it was a deliberate attack on
civilians.”

As an initial matter, contrary to what Lamb
writes, Human Rights Watch does not oppose (or endorse)
“the right to resist” of Hezbollah or the Palestinian
people – or of any armed group anywhere in the world. We
simply hold Hezbollah, as we hold any party to an armed
conflict, whether a state or an armed group, to its
obligations under international humanitarian law to spare,
to the greatest extent possible, civilians from harm during
armed conflict.

Lamb’s main criticism seems to be that
Human Rights Watch discounted the presence of Israeli
military objectives placed in civilian areas, which would
undermine our finding that Hezbollah’s attacks amounted to
a pattern of indiscriminate and sometimes deliberate attacks
on civilians. Lamb either missed or ignored the several
instances where we indeed documented the presence of Israel
Defense Force (IDF) troops or weapons in the vicinity of a
Hezbollah rocket attack. I know of no other public document
that identifies so many Israeli military objects situated
near some of the civilian areas that Hezbollah rockets hit,
such as the naval base adjacent to Rambam Hospital in Haifa,
the IDF northern command in Safed, the Raphael defense
industry campus north of Kiryat Yam, and artillery pieces
near Arab al-Aramshe and Kiryat Shmona. And we accordingly
criticized Israel for failing in its duty to avoid
endangering civilians by placing military assets in
populated areas.

Yet the presence of IDF military assets
in populated areas does not absolve Hezbollah of culpability
for indiscriminately firing into them: that is, even if
Hezbollah had a military target in mind, it failed to take
precautions, in its targeting and its use of weapons, to
distinguish between military and civilian objects in order
to minimize civilian loss. Human Rights Watch similarly
criticized Israel for failing to discriminate between
legitimate Hezbollah military targets and civilians in its
bombing of southern Lebanon. Furthermore, Lamb does not
account for the numerous instances where we found no
evidence of any IDF military target in civilian areas that
Hezbollah nevertheless repeatedly targeted.

Lamb complains
that we acknowledge Israeli censorship of news about
successful Hezbollah strikes on Israeli military targets but
then ignore the extent to which it calls our findings into
doubt. As a human rights organization, we focus on attacks
that kill and injure civilians and determine whether they
violated international humanitarian law. So whether
Hezbollah hit military objects more than is known is neither
relevant to our analysis nor would excuse the scores of
Hezbollah’s indiscriminate and deliberate attacks on
civilian areas.

The attacks on Nahariya and Karmiel are
illustrative. Hezbollah struck these two cities with
hundreds of rockets throughout the course of the war,
hitting residential neighborhoods in various parts of each
city. Based on site visits and interviews, we concluded that
there were no significant military objectives in either
city, although there are defense industries located near,
but outside, both. Our conclusion was that Hezbollah set out
deliberately to hit these cities, in violation of the laws
of war. Even if it turned out that we had overlooked a
military target in either town, its presence would not
justify Hezbollah’s firing of hundreds of rockets that
landed all over Nahariya and Karmiel not on one or two days,
but over an entire month.

Lamb also assails Human Rights
Watch for accusing Hezbollah commanders of war crimes
without having the requisite evidence to back up such
serious charges. We stand by our findings. Firing
deliberately or indiscriminately at civilians with criminal
intent is a war crime. Our report quotes many statements by
Hezbollah leaders indicating their intent to fire
indiscriminately if not deliberately at civilian areas. For
example, Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah stated on July
29, 2006:

When, throughout the Arab-Israeli
conflict [have] 2 million Israelis [been] forced [before] to
leave their areas or stay in shelters for 18 days or more?
This number will increase when we expand the
“beyond-Haifa” stage. The shelling of the city of Afula
and its military base represented the beginning of this
stage. Many cities in the centre will be a target in the
beyond-Haifa stage if the barbaric aggression against our
homeland, people, and villages continues.

This indication of intent, when
coupled with the evidence we collected on the ground of
deliberate and indiscriminate attacks on civilians, is
evidence of war crimes, regardless of the justifications
Hezbollah may have offered for pursuing this policy.

Lamb’s critique of Human Rights Watch’s methodology
is familiar because it resembles the arguments used by many
of those who seek to discredit our finding that Israel’s
indiscriminate fire was the main cause of Lebanese civilian
deaths during the 2006 war. (See our report “Why They
Died: Civilian Casualties in Lebanon during the 2006 War”
(http://hrw.org/reports/2007/lebanon0907/).
These critics assert that if Human Rights Watch found almost
no Hezbollah presence near Lebanese civilians when Israeli
fire killed them, it is because of flaws in our methodology:
that we relied on untrustworthy Lebanese witnesses, or that
we lacked access to the classified, real-time intelligence
the Israeli army used concerning Hezbollah’s whereabouts.

Some Lebanese and Israeli witnesses may have been
uninformed or untruthful when answering our questions about
the proximity of military objects at the time of enemy
attacks. But in both our reports on Israel and Lebanon, we
explain the additional evidence that supports our
conclusions as to the nature of the attacks in their midst.
In Israel, we interviewed whenever possible both Jewish and
Arab eyewitnesses, favoring those whose testimony could be
corroborated by other independent testimonies or physical
evidence; we conducted on-site visits; and we monitored
Hezbollah’s declarations to the media about specific
attacks it carried out.

I invite readers to consult the
reports and judge for themselves.

In closing, writing in
a strictly personal capacity, I am repelled by Lamb’s
assertion that “70 percent of [Human Rights Watch’s]
budget [is] estimated to be provided by Jewish
contributors.” Make no mistake: this unsourced and
factually untrue statement is anti-Semitic and not
anti-Zionist. It perpetuates the time-worn canard that all
Jews share a political agenda – Israel right or wrong –
and that with their lucre they pull the strings behind the
scenes.

*************

Eric Goldstein is the research director of the Middle East
and North Africa Division of Human Rights Watch and
principal author of “Civilians under Assault:
Hezbollah’s Rocket Attacks on Israel in the 2006
War.”

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